Here’s Why People Get Shot Reaching Towards Their Waistbands

BearingArms has an interesting piece explaining why you may get shot if you make motions consistent with going for a gun.

If you make a threatening motion, you may be shot

When a person approached by officers makes a motion consistent with an attempt to draw a weapon (especially a motion consistent with drawing a handgun from the waistband), they run a high risk of being shot by any competently-trained officer.

Why?

Because one thing officers learn during the course of their training is the proven truism that action is always faster than reaction.

Officers know that if they wait to positively identify a weapon after it has been drawn, the bad guy will have 3-5 rounds downrange before they can even process the information that bullets are coming at them.

To have any chance at all of surviving, officers must make the commitment to fire the moment they see and process that a person is making a movement consistent with an attempt to draw a weapon.

If they’re good, the officer may be able to to break the shot at the same time as the bad guy is trying to draw the weapon from concealment, if the officer already has a weapon drawn and held at the ready.

If they have their hand on the gun but it remains holstered, or the officer does not have their hand near the gun when a suspect reaches, they’re already behind the curve. They better hope that they’re more accurate, because the officer is not going to get the first shots off, and they know it.

The author has a video showing just how all this looks in real life; just how quickly a cop can end up dead.

This is the kind of thing that journalists, politicians and Police brass need to understand and remember with every officer involved shooting. Because that was probably less than 2 seconds from, “Hey officer! What’s up?” to being shot multiple times and maybe dead. Frightening. Sobering.